


speculorum somnium est

by besselfcn



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Dream Sex, Dubious Consent, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, M/M, Minor CDTH spoilers, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:54:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21761785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: Let me in, Ronan. Dream with me.
Relationships: Joseph Kavinsky/Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey III/Ronan Lynch, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish, Ronan Lynch/Bryde
Comments: 19
Kudos: 87





	speculorum somnium est

**Author's Note:**

> Everything except Adam/Ronan is, for the most part, in Ronan's dreams. 
> 
> Note the dubious consent tag; there's no explicit sex happening here, but there's some very Kavinsky-esque things happening with Kavinsky, and some very Bryde-esque imagery happening with Bryde.

I

The first time it happened, it was a boy he knew during that one awful spring when Niall convinced him to try out competitive swimming. 

Ronan, thirteen, was awful at it; this boy, fifteen, was not. He was fast, and lean, and when they all got out of the pool at the end of laps he’d shake his head out and the water would fly everywhere and the coach would yell at them but he would laugh, and it would make Ronan laugh, and then he’d look away shamefully without knowing what to be ashamed of. 

The summer after that season was over, Ronan stood on the edge of a wide, slanting lake. That boy stood in front of him, his hands outstretched. 

_Come on_ , he said. _Let me show you._

Ronan walked forward. The boy took his hand; where their skin touched it burned like sun-baked sand, and it spread outward through his skin, up his shoulder, down his stomach, until he felt like he was going to crack right out of his body and burst. 

The boy pulled. Ronan fell. 

Down, down, down, to the water with suddenly no sand beneath it--he was slipping silently through the water that scorched off his skin where it touched him, leaving a trail of steam behind and the boy standing up above him, looking down through a thin window of the water above while he drowned.

Then he woke up.

His face felt hot; his skin was still damp. The taste of saltwater lingered between his teeth.

He stole another blanket from the linen closet across the hall and went back to sleep. 

III

That damned dream with the tattoo was the third time. 

He’d gotten up and thrown all his sheets in the wash then, too, and then crawled back into bed on just the mattress, face hidden under pillows, chest heaving with something like fear.

II

The second time, of all people, had been Gansey. 

Even though it made his mouth screw up into a grimace to think of now, it made sense. In the way that dreams ever make sense. 

It had been after the hospital. After the doctors. After being prescribed pills he flushed down the drain the second he was let out on his own and after moving into the room across from Gansey’s at Monmouth. 

“Ronan,” Gansey had said seriously, as if Gansey could say anything in any other way. “If you need anything, I’m always here.”

Ronan had said nothing, but his throat had burned to hear it. 

Once in a while they drove. Not towards or away from anything in particular; just wide sweeping drives throughout the hills outside Henrietta, Ronan with his hand out the window pushing his fingers through the air and breathing, just breathing. 

Gansey talked on these drives as much as he liked. These were the drives where he talked about the ley line. These were the drives where he explained Glendower. These were the drives where Gansey told Ronan what it meant to be Gansey. 

They would return to Monmouth late enough to be tired in the morning, which is how Ronan liked it, but early enough to make it to school, which is how Gansey liked it. 

After one of these drives Ronan slept, and Gansey followed. 

A clear open meadow. A sky that burned bluer than blue. Grass that sunk an inch down as Ronan walked, like striding across foam. 

Gansey, walking next to him, said, “ _Speculorum somnium est_.”

Ronan said, “You don’t speak Latin.”

Gansey shrugged. “Not usually,” he admitted. He put his hands in his pockets and rocked back onto his heels. It was a move so Gansey that it made Ronan’s head ache if he thought too much about it. “It’s nice, here. Sounds right.”

Ronan folded his arms up. In life, the scabs were still peeling down the length of his forearms. In dreams, they alternated between open, bleeding wounds and smooth, unmarred skin. “What do you want, Gansey?”

Gansey stepped towards him. “What do you want?” he said, in Ronan’s voice, and leaned forward to press their mouths together. 

Ronan jolted. He opened his mouth. Something bounced from Gansey’s tongue onto his, onto the roof of his mouth, buzzed across his gums. Gansey fell away; the grass fell away; the sky crashed down to meet him.

He woke with his jaw wired shut and something gently flapping against the back of his teeth. After a few agonizing seconds of frozen disgust he gasped, and opened his mouth, and watched a hornet dart down the halls of Monmouth Manufacturing.

“Oh, fuck,” he said eloquently, and sprung out of bed to chase it down with a chemistry textbook.

That was how Gansey found him: smashing a hornet into the wall in his underwear, unable to meet Gansey’s eyes.

“Everything okay?” Gansey asked, eyeing Ronan and the hornet both with equal concern and suspicion.

“Fine,” Ronan said. “I’ll call an exterminator.”

Gansey nodded. “Okay,” he said, and clapped his hand on Ronan’s shoulders as they walked back to their rooms. 

V

Kavinsky is not an open lake. Kavinsky is not a too-blue meadow. 

Kavinsky is a car engine slicked with gasoline. Kavinsky is a knife in Ronan’s stomach. Kavinsky is hands wrapped around his throat saying _come on, Lynch. All you have to do is wake up_.

If he wakes up he will be in the Barns with Adam. If he wakes up he will be able to breathe again. If he wakes up Kavinsky will be dead and he will be the only one.

So he lies there against the hood of the Camaro staring into a blood-red sky and says, even though he has no air, “I’m sorry.”

Kavinsky, who is not Kavinsky, who looks and tastes and feels like Kavinsky, says, “It’s cute the way you think that matters.”

Kavinsky’s hands are on his throat and the world is cracking at the edges but it doesn’t feel like dying. He knows what dying feels like. This is not unmaking; this is being made. This is an explosion in the center of his chest. This is his legs kicking into nothing and the thought _not like this_ that echoes against the walls of the dream until it says _like this, like this, like this, this, this_ \--

“Ronan.”

Adam’s voice. His hands. Ronan wakes up too slowly. Too slowly.

When he finally can move he curls up into Adam’s chest, his arm thrown around his stomach. He feels something wet on his lips. For a moment he worries what it is he’s brought back, but when he touches his tongue to it it comes out tasting like copper. He realizes, in a daze, that he’s bit through his tongue. 

“It’s okay,” Adam says. And then, “Do you want to talk about it.”

Adam is trying. He knows he’s trying. So Ronan tries to make his mouth form the words _yes_. Then he imagines what they’d have to say next. 

“No,” he says. 

Adam breathes and doesn’t move, in that way that means he’s trying very hard to not move. 

“Okay,” he says, because he’s Adam. “Okay.”

IV

Adam.

Adam, who talks to forests. Adam, who scries into dreams. Adam, who loves him, he loves him, he loves him. 

What an impossible thought. 

Everything with Adam is more, is new, is first. He presses all the _firsts_ he has with Adam into a scrapbook that he keeps in his chest and pries open when his heart says _shut it down, what’s the point of all this, anyhow?_

The first time Adam kissed him. The first time he saw Adam outside Aglionby. The first time they fell into bed together. The first time he heard Adam speak Latin. The first time Adam looked at him with those eyes that cut down into his heart and Ronan thought _careful, Lynch, careful_ , without knowing why. The first time he thought, careening down a parking lot on the back of a shopping cart, _fuck being careful_.

The first time they dreamed together. 

It had been Adam who’d asked. With Ronan biting into the skin of his neck, he’d whispered, “I want to dream with you.”

Ronan had sat back with electricity running up his spine. “Oh,” he’d said. 

Adam had flinched. “If it’s not-- I mean, if you don’t want me to--”

“Shut up,” Ronan had snapped, and laid back on the bed, heart hammering in his chest. “Come here.”

Even with how good he’d gotten at falling from the waking world into a dream, the anticipation running through his veins had kept him awake for a minute, two minutes, five, an agonizing time. 

But then Adam was there--real Adam, living Adam, caught in a dream, his skin already pressed against Ronan’s where they lay in a sea of rolling poppies that stretched up and up to the sky. 

“Oh,” Adam said. The sound seeped into Ronan’s skin. He shivered. “Oh,” Adam said again. 

And he kept saying it: _oh, oh_ , as the dream curved around them, bodies pressing together, close in a way that was impossible in life, in a way that was devouring and total and both gave and demanded more and more and more.

When Ronan woke up he was clutching a handful of flowers. 

He handed them silently to Adam, who had gone beet red. All the marks across his skin were woefully erased; he, after all, was not a dreamer. Just a boy who visited dreams. 

“Holy shit,” Adam said, after a minute. “We should do that again.”

VI

_Do you hear them, Ronan?_

What Ronan hears is the heartbeat in his ears. The rush of static across his skin. The roaring behind him like a thunderstorm too far away.

 _They want to unmake you. They_ will _unmake you, if you let them. If you stop dreaming, just for them._

He walks. The hands pull him back; against his chest, against his ankles, against his wrists. 

_You still think your dreams are just your dreams? That you’re the only one here? When you’ve invited so many other people in?_

His head jerks back; his mouth is pried open. He bites down and feels something recoil, annoyed. 

_Let me in, Ronan. Dream with me. Let me in. Let me in. Let me in._

He claws his way through smoke. It turns to ash, to rot, to death against his skin. 

_LET ME IN_.

“Get the fuck out,” Ronan snaps, and throws himself out of the dream, plummeting as he goes. 

When he wakes up the fire alarm is beeping, Chainsaw screeching in unison. The air is hazy with dream smoke that he already knows he will need to gather up handful by handful to be rid of. His body aches from imagined effort, and there is no one in the house but him. 

He lays still until he is able to move. Then he says, “Fuck.”

**Author's Note:**

> I, like Gansey, don't speak Latin, so don't come for me if this title is wrong. We are all just living our best lives here.
> 
> Find me on twitter @besselfcn.


End file.
